


The Adventures Held Around the Empty House

by merryghoul



Series: Suzanne Costello: Life is All [1]
Category: Luther (TV), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Fusion, BBC Sherlock Fusion, Community: torchwood_fest, Gen, Same Performer in Different Roles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-18
Updated: 2012-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 09:32:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/pseuds/merryghoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of “Colonel Suzie” Costello, how she met Moriarty and how she ended up working with Torchwood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventures Held Around the Empty House

**Author's Note:**

> I realize Moffat, if he does attempt _The Adventure of the Empty House_ , will Joss this because, well, he’s Moffat. But making Suzie Moriarty’s Sebastian Moran (with a touch of the guy that made Moriarty’s air gun in the Holmes books) makes sense to me.
> 
> There are hat tips to the real lives of Naoko Mori and Indira Varma I couldn’t resist.
> 
> The original fic is at torchwood_fest for their 2012 Post Christmas Blues crossover fest. (No link since it's friends-locked to the comm.) I cut two lines from the original piece there because I thought the lines were too American-centric. Other than that, the piece is how it looks from torchwood_fest.
> 
> With thanks to my beta schweet_heart for helping me make Moriarty, and, in turn, Suzie, creepier.

_The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. –Verbal Knit_

COSTELLO, Suzanne ("Suzie"), alias "Colonel Suzie."  Unemployed.  Born Bath 1977.  Educated at the Royal Russell School and Oxford University.  Member of Keble College.  Formerly of the defunct paranormal organization “Torchwood 3,” located in Wales.  Daughter of – Costello, son of an Irish father and an Indian mother.  She appears to be his only child.

– Costello was killed by Ms. Costello in 2007.  Her mother is not known, possibly dead.  Other than Jim Moriarty, Ms. Costello’s associates prior to moving to Cardiff are not known.  According to police files held in Scotland Yard, most of her Torchwood associates are dead: 

  * Ben Brown V, perished in “Auton invasion.”
  * Doctor Owen Harper, killed by an Aaron Copley.  Later perished in radioactive wastes.  (Between those periods, was believed to be a “living corpse.”)
  * Toshiko Sato, fatally shot by the brother of a “Captain Jack Harkness” known as Gray.
  * Ianto Jones, poisoned by “alien virus” during the “456” incident of 2009.



Former associates Gwen Cooper and the aforementioned Harkness still living, but their whereabouts are unknown.

Her Pilgrim associates in Cardiff are also dead, killed by Ms. Costello or her henchman, Max Tresilian.  Max Tresilian’s whereabouts are unknown—he escaped when a Bilis Manger freed Torchwood 3’s Vaults.  Torchwood 3 was not a very attentive agency, having failed to discover Tresilian’s whereabouts after 2008 (let alone the Pilgrim crime ring). 

She has faked her death several times.

  * Attempt one: Managed to fool Cooper and Harkness into believing she committed suicide through a gunshot wound in the chin. 
    * The gun had a trigger to set off a squib hidden inside a fake fleshy mass in her hair, enough blood to matte her hair and leave a pool of fake blood, free of fake brain matter, on the grounds of the Millennium Centre.
    * The gun’s trigger also set off a small explosion of pancake makeup which left a fake gunshot wound under her chin.  Having worked with Torchwood 3 for many years, Ms. Costello knew the rest of the team wouldn’t make sure the wounds were fatal, not even Dr. Harper, who was scared of Ms. Costello’s presence.  They had an affair when she was “alive,” and they must’ve had very kinky sex he didn’t like.
    * She used a combination extreme method of relaxation and Suxamethonium chloride, just enough to register as dead to Torchwood 3 for a few minutes.  The rest of the team went home while Harkness slept in a bunker under Torchwood 3’s headquarters, known as the Hub.  Utilizing the lax security in the Hub, Ms. Costello held her breath, jimmied the lock inside the vault and walked out.



Between this “death” and the next, Ms. Costello hid in a Cardiff suburb.  Her convincing “resurrection” involved a three-pronged prop knife that retracted and stood up when she was stabbed and left chemicals that only show up on ultraviolet light, to give an appearance that she was “sucking the life” out of Cooper with an otherwise useless metal “gauntlet.” 

  * Attempt two:   Believed to have been shot multiple times by Harkness and then killed when the “gauntlet” “linking” her life to Cooper was destroyed.  
    * More squibs, this time hidden on a bulletproof vest, triggered when Harkness shot at her.  A safeguard to sell the death again if she had to.  
    * Ms. Costello also utilized the same method of relaxation and Suxamethonium chloride that she used in Attempt One. 
    * Ms. Costello had coffee and biscuits with Cooper; while Cooper wasn’t looking, Ms. Costello added Suxamethonium chloride to her coffee, causing Cooper to feel sleepy, enough to convince Torchwood she had “died” if Harkness hadn’t caught up with her.
    * During her ride with Cooper in Cooper’s car to Greenleaves hospital, Ms. Costello smeared blood in Cooper’s head, making Cooper feel as if she was receiving Ms. Costello’s fake gunshot wound.  



After her second “death,” Ms. Costello left the UK for a while, spending time in Italy and South Africa, places she knew Torchwood wouldn’t find and actually kill her.  She then returned to the Cardiff suburbs in time to hear about the government betraying Torchwood 3.  From there, she snuck back into the Hub, back into her place in the Vault. 

  * Prior to being in the Vault Ms. Costello hypnotized several people she aided in Torchwood, telling them to leave a suicide note of “I remember” before killing themselves.
  * Ms. Costello and some Welsh associates of Moriarty (better behaved than Pilgrim) took randoms off the street, killed them and incinerated them at an incineration plant to have Harkness believe there was a literal “darkness” consuming her soul.  She also stabbed a few people to sell the “darkness is consuming my soul” act, the most notable victim looking somewhat like Harkness.
  * Ms. Costello’s final attempt to fake her death involved the kidnapping and murder of DI Tom Cutler, near the Vault she escaped out of.  She cut Cutler’s eyes out and left Cutler alone with an eyeless wax dummy of herself.  Ms. Costello convinced Cutler of her “soul-consuming darkness” and ordered him to set off explosions near the Vault in an attempt to (successfully) attract Harkness’ attention from afar.  When she finally convinced Harkness she was truly “dead,” she returned to London for good.



Address: Conduit Street.  Clubs: the Anglo-Indian, Tankerville and Bagatelle Card Club.  Believed to have taken the “Colonel Suzie” alias again.  May have also taken names of deceased women who look like her and/or are of Indian origin as aliases. 

The oddest and most dangerous woman in London—S.H. 

 

2013.

Suzie sits in jail, calmly awaiting her release.  Sure, Sherlock Holmes, on his redemption trail after his faked death, had discovered she murdered Roland Adair over Texas Hold ‘Em with an iPhone she modified as a gun.  Her attempts at seducing (and later realizing he was asexual) and killing Holmes didn’t help her either. But Suzie has friends who have friends in law enforcement.  She’ll be back in her expensive flat in no time.  Her flat doesn’t ease the sting of not having Jim Moriarty’s crime ring.  That was foiled after Holmes pretended to die.  Her allies will say they mistakenly arrested Zoe Luther.  Luther was estranged from her husband and took another lover at the time of her death in 2010.  She also had a posh flat.  And Suzie could easily pass for 40. 

She was able to sneak old newspaper articles on the death of Moriarty in her cell.  She unfolds one of them, which proclaims ACTOR RICHARD BROOK FOUND DEAD ON ROOFTOP. 

“I can’t believe he really did that,” Suzie says to herself, looking at the fake actor head shot of Moriarty.  She sighs and pulled out another newspaper article. 

 _May as well remember the good old days with Jim,_ she thinks. 

Suzie had always dreamed of killing her father.

Her mother was plagued with fertility problems prior to her birth.  Fortunately, her family was wealthy enough to afford fertility treatments.  Costello stopped at nothing to ensure his child, despite his Indian and Irish parentage, was a) conceived and b) male.

Costello achieved conception, but much to his dismay, the child that resulted after rounds of fertility treatments was female.  And Costello didn’t want to go through yet another round of fertility treatments. 

He took his anger of Suzie not being male (and named Sunesh—he refused to name a female child if he had one) by taking it out on Suzie.  For a time he burned Suzie on her arm with his cigarettes.  He also was fond of repeatedly beating Suzie with belts until her skin was black and blue.  It was because of the beltings that Suzie adopted skirts and pants as part of her outfit.  It also drove her to go to boarding school in London, far away from her father for most days of the year. 

She never would forget the abuse she suffered at her father’s hands. 

 

2003.

Le Méridien Picadilly

London

Suzie went to Oxford to learn how to make weaponry.  She wasn’t interested in anything else, other than literary and poetry classes she used as electives and rifling as sport.  She used a job in engineering in London for her cover of making the most covert yet deadliest weapon she could use—one that would allow her to get away with the murder of her father.

Her father decided to visit her in London and stay at Le Méridien.  He decided to take a swim in the hotel’s pool.  Suzie stood on the edge of the pool, holding a mobile phone in her right hand.  She squatted against the edge of pool, adjusting the phone where she thought his head would be. 

As soon as she was about to press a button on the phone a man in a white towel stood directly behind her.

“Boo.”

Suzie dropped the phone.  It fell to the ground and left a small explosion on the pool floor.  The man grabbed Suzie; the two ran into a corner.

“You bloody fool.”

“Did I scare you?”

“Did you scare me?  Are you really going to ask me that?”

“Yes.”

“I was going to kill my father, that bastard swimming in the pool.”

The man pointed at Suzie’s father, then at the phone explosion.  “Him?  With that?”

“Yes, with _that._ ”

“Did you make that?”

“Of course I made that.  If it was a regular mobile phone, it would’ve not made a black spot on the floor.  I call it a mobile gun.”

The man extended his hand to Suzie.  “Jim Moriarty.  I want you to make a mobile gun for me.”

“Suzanne Costello.  Call me ‘Suzie.’  And why do you want a mobile gun?”

“You never know when you’ll need a mobile gun, Suzie.”  He grinned.

 

Suzie’s second mobile phone gun sat on a table in Moriarty’s flat.  Upstairs a couple of Moriarty’s minions were playing poker and being loud.

“Feels just like my birthday.”  Moriarty jumped up and down.  “How does it work, Suzie?”

Suzie flipped the phone over on the counter.  She removed the back of the phone.  Instead of a lithium-ion battery in the battery compartment, it was filled with small bullets.

“See this?  Those are.22 calibre bullets.  You can load about four of them at a time in the gun.”  She shut the battery compartment.  “Only works in close ranges.  You have to pretend to hand someone your phone or take someone’s picture.  But it’s effective.” 

“And the trigger?”

“The star button.”

The minions were arguing louder upstairs. 

“Can I try it now, Suzie?  Please?”

Suzie handed Moriarty the mobile gun.  He went upstairs to the room where the minions were arguing.  Suzie followed him. 

Moriarty stood near one of the minions, who had failed to notice his and Suzie’s presence in the room.

“Boys, boys, if you don’t behave, I’ll have to call your mums on you,” Moriarty said.

The minions continued arguing. 

“I warned you.”

Moriarty pretended to dial a number before pressing the star button.  A bullet shot out of the gun and went straight through the minion’s throat.  The minion gasped for air as he bled to death all over himself and Moriarty’s chair.  The other minion shut up.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting that.  I should dial an ambulance.  Don’t you think?”  Moriarty asked the other minion.

“No.  _No!_ ”

Moriarty walked to the minion.  “If you say so.” 

He pressed the star button on the phone and the other minion suffocated and bled to death.

Moriarty turned to Suzie.  “I’ll take five.”

 

Over the next month Suzie made five more mobile guns for Moriarty.  When she finished the fifth gun for him, he gave her a suitcase.

“Happy birthday, Suzie.”

“Jim, it’s not May.  It’s not my birthday yet.” 

Moriarty hushed her.  “Let’s pretend it is.  I’ve got some friends at the Aylesbury Estate I want you to meet.”

Moriarty grabbed her hand.  He drove her to the Aylesbury Estate in South London.  There, they travelled to the top floor of one of the buildings in the estate.  A room overlooking a courtyard was prepared in advance for them.

“Open the suitcase, Suzie.”

Inside the suitcase were the parts of a Heckler & Koch precision shooting rifle.

“Word on the street is that not only are you good at making things, you’re also good at shooting things.”

"I used to be a member of the Oxford University Pistol Club.   It was the only sport I could get into at college.”

“I have a challenge for you.  Look carefully at that yard.”

Moriarty and Suzie looked out into the courtyard.  There were three people doing a drug deal in the middle of the courtyard. 

“See those men?  They work for me.  They want to start a business without my guidance.  And I want to explain to them they can’t do that.  Once you make a deal for protection with me, you stay with me or you lose that protection.”  Moriarty took a breath. “This _gorgeous_ police rifle—I borrowed it with permission—should make that point clear.”

“Jim, I’ve never used that type of rifle before.  I’ve only dealt with the Olympic rifles they give you back in Oxford.  And that was before that ban on handguns in 1997.”

Moriarty put one of the mobile guns Suzie made for him to her head.  “Do it or you’re dead.  Listen, I believe in you, Suzie.  Don’t make me do this.  You have so much potential.”

Suzie looked at the Heckler & Koch rifle for a few moments.  She took a breath and calmly put it together.  Moriarty took the gun off of Suzie’s head and opened the window for her.  She put the rifle on the ledge of the window and looked through the viewfinder of the rifle.  Once one of the men was in the rifle’s crosshairs, she fired.

The bullet went through the man’s brain, making it explode. 

Suzie reloaded and waited until the other two men had stopped panicking to put another one in her crosshairs.  The other two men were also shot in the brain and instantly died.

Moriarty looked outside the window and inspected Suzie’s work.  “Great job, Suzie.  Too bad the military’s iffy on women going into combat.  You’d make a great colonel.”  Moriarty shook her hand.  “Congratulations.  You’re my second-in-command.  And you can be Colonel Suzie for all I care.”

 

Later that year, Suzie called Moriarty.

“Jim?”

_“Yes, Colonel?”_

“My bastard father’s contracted lung disease.  He’s been moved to some hospital in Wales where they can treat him.  He wants me there by his side as if he never hit me.”

_“Where?”_

“Greenleaves Hospital.  Outside some small town no one’s heard of called Arnston.  I think it’s minutes away from Cardiff, if that helps.”

_“Perfect!  I have a job opening for you there.”_

“But I’m already your second-in-command here.”

_“There’s a small group of thieves in Cardiff.  They call themselves ‘Pilgrim.’  Their front is a religious debate organization.  You know, ‘Does God exist?’ “Yes, he does!”  “No, he doesn’t!”  “Shut the fuck up!”  But at night they steal from banks and jewellery stores.  They’ve gotten a bit rowdy over the past few months.  They need a babysitter.”_

“You want me to infiltrate their compound and kill them all in exchange for me being forced to stay with my father.”

_“Exactly.  Just try to keep in contact with me, okay?”_

“I’ll try.”

 

Suzie took a day job in a computer repair shop in Cardiff, fixing physical components and removing viruses.  At night, she went to the Pilgrim meetings, attempting to reign in the small Cardiff band of thieves.   She was quickly getting bored of both jobs.

One day her day job boss was in the back room, violently convulsing in a chair for reasons unknown.  Before Suzie could call 999, two men busted through her job with guns. 

“Stay where you are!” the man in the greatcoat said.  “There’s something wrong with this man.  We think an alien virus was downloaded into his body.”

“Maybe I can remove it from him.  Help you lot out.”

Suzie helped the man in the greatcoat and the other man remove the virus (or so she was told) from her boss’ body.  After her boss recovered, the man in the greatcoat gave her boss a bottle of water laced with a chemical agent.  Her boss passed out in seconds.

The man in the greatcoat extended her hand to Suzie.  “Captain Jack Harkness.  This is Ben Brown V.”

Ben waved at Suzie.

“We’re Torchwood.  Say, you’re really good at computers.”

“I do most of the repairs in this shop.”  She blushed.

“I think we have a job opportunity for you.  Would you like to join us?”

It wasn’t like Suzie could say “no.”

* * *

Suzie didn’t want to reveal her connections with Moriarty to Torchwood 3.  She tended to herself at Torchwood as a safety mechanism.  Toshiko Sato, recruited after Ben had died but before Jack recruited Owen Harper and Ianto Jones, was just as secretive as she was.  Tosh’s secrecy made it easier for Suzie to be secretive.

When she could break away from her professional facade at Torchwood, Suzie contacted Moriarty through emails.  She never saved copies of emails on her hard drive or in her email accounts.  Moriarty was wondering why it was taking her so long to murder Pilgrim.  Suzie said she was trying, but she accidentally was involved with Britain’s real life version of America’s FBI Secret Agents dealing with X-files. 

Suzie told Jack and the others Torchwood was the best job she ever had, but in reality she was bored with this job like she was bored with the computer job.  The difference was she could get Starbucks whenever she wanted with the computer job and not whenever Jack sent Tosh to pick it up. 

Jack, noticing Suzie was bored with the constant Weevil hunts, alien threats, revenants and displaced people from the Rift, gave Suzie a gauntlet.  The gauntlet did nothing.  Suzie, however, found a way to adjust the gauntlet to have it perform ventriloquism, making the dead people seem as if they were talking for a minute.  Her act was even more convincing when the dead people she used it on died violently.

Jack then gave Suzie a three-pronged knife, a knife which could puncture all the chambers of a human heart, rendering it useless.  By that time Suzie met Max, a man close to her age she could seduce and hypnotize to take care of Pilgrim.  The two went to Pilgrim meetings so Max could recognize Moriarty’s enemies.

Meanwhile, Suzie planned to finally leave Torchwood with a bang.  She’d kill a few people to make it look like Torchwood had finally gotten the better of her, get the attention of Cardiff police (they’d be a bit more attentive than the believers at Torchwood, she thought), and fake her suicide, all while having _Max_ kill Pilgrim.  Torchwood would figure out Max killed all those people in Pilgrim about three months after she would fake her suicide via a sedative and a squib in her hair.  Torchwood would want to “resurrect” her to get information about the Pilgrim murders.  She could use her “resurrection” to spook Torchwood while convincing one of the believers to take her to see her father, finally killing him. 

And after that, she’d be free to wander the earth, as long as she changed her identity on anything she needed to get around with.  And she had to make sure she stayed on the down low until Torchwood 3 really thought she was dead.

It would take Owen and Tosh’s deaths, an explosion ordered by the government, dismantling Torchwood 3, and another murder (this time of DI Tom Cutler), combined with another explosion, to ensure she’d be dead in Torchwood’s (or, at the very least, Jack Harkness’) eyes.

After her final assumed Torchwood death, Suzie finally came home to London.  Colonel Suzie Costello was back.  Jim welcomed her back with open arms.

 

2012.

Suzie ran to the top of the building where Jim and Sherlock had their standoff, but she was too late.  She saw Jim’s lifeless body on the rooftop.  There was no sign of Sherlock, but she assumed she jumped to his death.  She didn’t bother looking over the ledge—she heard ambulances and sensed there would be a crowd looking at Sherlock’s body.

Suzie went back down the stairs as quickly as she could.  She called the hit man nearest to John Watson.

“Call off the hit on Watson,” Suzie said.  “Sherlock’s dead.”

* * *

“I think Jim was inspired by my letters,” Suzie says to herself.  She is still looking at her newspaper clippings.  “Erasing files from computers, changing identities, the whole lot.  Guess he felt blowing his brains out was the only way he could sell Sherlock’s death.  But Sherlock’s more like me—he thinks one step ahead.”  She sighs.  “Jim bloody Moriarty, the most brilliant man I ever knew.”  She folds up the newspaper clippings.

A constable walks up to Suzie’s jail cell.  “Sorry about the confusion, Mrs. Luther.”

“That’s okay.  Hasn’t been the first time I’ve been mistaken for ‘Colonel Suzie’ Costello.  Used to get funny stares when I walked into Ford & Vargas sometimes.  I hope you do find her someday.”

“Do you want us to call your husband?”

“No.”

As the constable leads Suzie out of her cell, Suzie thinks _Time to rebuild, Jim.  I know you’d want me to._  

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N 2: Actor-specific hat tips and crossover notes:
> 
> Indira Varma was born in Bath (but in 1973, not 1977).
> 
> Naoko Mori went to the Royal Russell School in London.
> 
> In an interview, Indira Varma says she went on holiday in Italy while pregnant.
> 
> Indira Varma plays Suzie Costello (in _Torchwood_ ) and Zoe Luther (estranged wife of lead character John Luther in _Luther_ ). Suzie steals Zoe's identity and occupation (a lawyer at Ford & Vargas) to get out of jail. Since Suzie doesn't know or want to get in trouble with John Luther, she refuses to call John.


End file.
